This invention relates to milking apparatus, and has as its object the provision of such apparatus which enables milking of cows to be carried out with greater simplicity and ease of operation than is obtained in the prior art.
It is known to be desirable in the design of dairy apparatus, to provide an arrangement whereby the operator is able to work from a level somewhat below the level of the cows during milking. In this way, the operator is able to attend to the attachment of the teat cup cluster without bending, thereby reducing operator fatigue and increasing the efficiency of the operator. Various means have been proposed in the past to enable this to be achieved, but these known arrangements suffer from various disadvantages. For example, the known "herringbone" arrangement requires that cows be milked in batches of, for example, five, and this makes it impossible to achieve a continuous and orderly flow of cows through the dairy, and also requires active supervision of the cows awaiting milking. Another type of apparatus known employs a rotary milking system, but this requires that the cows enter in single file and has the additional disadvantage of upsetting the cows prior to milking, due to the rotation of the equipment.